The big news today across the tech media and blogosphere is the launch of the new Netscape, which is unofficially billed as a Digg killer. Masterminded by renegade publishing madman Jason Calcanis, AOL has transformed the old Netscape brand name into a truly hip and useful user-voted content site, which is still in beta at http://www.beta.netscape.com/.
Like Digg, the new Netscape allows users to vote up an article — a bunch of Digg users voted up negative AOL stories when I checked it, which is kind of funny and makes the site even more interesting. What makes the site really interesting is that it blends editorial with technology. Netscape has a staff of eight “bloggers” that dig through the news, add their own summaries or spin, and put their recommendations at the top.
To the credit of the ailing AOL, they let the extremely entrepreneurial Calcanis do his thing, just the right move for a declining company in desperate need of some new killer idea and a bold departure from the bureaucratic way of doing things in Dulles.
At AOL, Mr. Calacanis thinks of himself as a renegade. His own blog (www.calacanis.com) is frequently critical of AOL’s bureaucracy and products. And he boasted that he had built the new Netscape outside the usual AOL procedures. Much of the work was done in a weeklong “code jam” when he assembled a dozen programmers in a suite at a luxury hotel overlooking the beach in Santa Monica, Calif.
“We have a smaller, quicker, lighter organization inside a bigger organization,” he said.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:55 AM|Comments(1)
AOL tries to keep the traffic to its own site. The big font title links to pages in netscape.com, only tiny fonts link to the source. The sources may not like that. There are too many ads, even in the center of the comments!
Diggol http://diggol.com just launched with automatic discovery of topics important to each user, personalized ranking, a TopicMap graph showing topics and relations among topics, and the news pages are complete ad-free.
Posted by: Paul Young at June 15, 2006 12:46 PM
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